category: medievalhttp://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/category/medieval
medievalenWomen’s Words: Female Instruction in the Medieval British Isles, Kalamazoo 2016, May 16th-20thhttp://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63166
<p>We invite you to participate in our session “Women’s Words: Female Instruction in the Medieval British Isles” at the 2016 meeting of the International Congress of Medieval Studies, May 12 – 16, Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI. </p>
<p>Our session invites papers which explore the relationship between teaching texts and learning women in conjunction with the language, locations, and spaces of female education. Submissions may include discussions of vernacular and Latin learning, spiritual and non-religious feminine instruction, the iconography and depiction of female learning, and the presentation and exchange of educational materials in a manuscript culture. </p>
<p>We hope to address gaps in current research and to explore the dynamics of female pedagogical literature, the creation of gendered instructional voices, and the forms and genres of women’s educational material, including explicitly didactic texts as well as books of manners, romances, and hagiography. We also invite papers examining the societal significance and influence of medieval women’s instructional literature especially in relation to works written and produced by women writers. In order to facilitate a dialogue between individual presentations, we will limit topics to the British Isles, but will leave the time period open to all medieval texts (500-1500).</p>
<p>Please submit a one-page abstract and a completed Participant Information Form (found at <a href="http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html" title="http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html">http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html</a>) to session organizers Jenny C. Bledsoe (Emory University) and Lainie Pomerleau (University of Georgia) at <a href="mailto:womenswritingmedievalinstitute@gmail.com">womenswritingmedievalinstitute@gmail.com</a> by September 15, 2015 (abstracts submitted after this date will not be considered).</p>
Mon, 27 Jul 2015 11:25:57 -040063166 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduWomen’s Words: Female Instruction in the Medieval British Isles, May 12¬-15, 2016http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63157
<p>We invite you to participate in our session “Women’s Words: Female Instruction in the Medieval British Isles” at the 2016 meeting of the International Congress of Medieval Studies, May 12 – 16, Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI. </p>
<p>Our session invites papers which explore the relationship between teaching texts and learning women in conjunction with the language, locations, and spaces of female education. Submissions may include discussions of vernacular and Latin learning, spiritual and non-religious feminine instruction, the iconography and depiction of female learning, and the presentation and exchange of educational materials in a manuscript culture. </p>
<p>We hope to address gaps in current research and to explore the dynamics of female pedagogical literature, the creation of gendered instructional voices, and the forms and genres of women’s educational material, including explicitly didactic texts as well as books of manners, romances, and hagiography. We also invite papers examining the societal significance and influence of medieval women’s instructional literature especially in relation to works written and produced by women writers. In order to facilitate a dialogue between individual presentations, we will limit topics to the British Isles, but will leave the time period open to all medieval texts (500-1500).</p>
<p>Please submit a one-page abstract and a completed Participant Information Form (found at <a href="http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html" title="http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html">http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html</a>) to session organizers Jenny C. Bledsoe (Emory University) and Lainie Pomerleau (University of Georgia) at <a href="mailto:womenswritingmedievalinstitute@gmail.com">womenswritingmedievalinstitute@gmail.com</a> by September 15, 2015 (abstracts submitted after this date will not be considered).</p>
Sun, 26 Jul 2015 11:30:06 -040063157 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduSubmission Call : The Sunflower Collectivehttp://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63155
<p>The Sunflower Collective is looking for submissions. We celebrate the personal and the political - which we believe to be one and the same thing - in art.</p>
<p>We would like to mention at the outset that we are not interested in art that does not take risks. We do not mind if you have a degree but we are unlikely to be impressed by it. Nor do we care which journals have published your work before. All we are interested in is something that sings for itself without any props, something that grabs us by our throat and refuses to let go, something that shakes us out of our complacent stupor. Give us something hungry, not bellyful; something beat, if you get our drift.</p>
<p>We express our inability to publish anything that propagates either left-wing or right-wing fascism.</p>
<p>Please send us your poems, prose, artwork and photographs in the body of the mail <a href="mailto:thesunflowercollectiveindia@gmail.com">thesunflowercollectiveindia@gmail.com</a>. Do read the submission guidelines before sending your work.</p>
<p>Submission Guidelines</p>
<p>1) Poetry: 1-5 poems (Around 5 pages of poetry in total)<br />
2) Prose: 2000-3000 words ( Fiction/ Non Fiction/ Experimental/Memoirs)<br />
3) Art work and Photographs/ Photo Essays (5-10 in JPEG format and must not exceed 250K in size )<br />
4) Format: Poetry and Prose submissions to be sent in the body of the mail, unless there are specific formatting requirements from the author (Needs to be mentioned in the mail). Photos and scanned Artwork in zipped folders. Photo essays in MS Word with zipped folders of JPEG images separately attached.</p>
Sun, 26 Jul 2015 06:21:44 -040063155 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduCall for Paper - Global Journal of English Language and Literaturehttp://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63148
<p>Papers are invited for the Volume 3, Issue 2 of the Global Journal of English Language and Literature (ISSN 2320-4397) to be published in August 2015. The forthcoming issue will be an Open Issue. The journal features densely theoretical and analytical writings that focus on various aspects of English Studies which address/approach the research problems with methods of and insights borrowed from multiple established disciplines. Accepted papers will be published after peer-review process. This is an online electronic journal and there will be no hard copy of the issues. There are no publication fees or handling charges. The last date for submission is 10th August, 2015. </p>
<p>Send us your previously unpublished original research articles in a single attachment to the following e-mail address: <a href="mailto:globaljournalell@gmail.com">globaljournalell@gmail.com</a> </p>
<p>Journal website: <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/globaljournalofell/" title="https://sites.google.com/site/globaljournalofell/">https://sites.google.com/site/globaljournalofell/</a></p>
<p>Global Journal of English Language and Literature, (GJELL), is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal for all those involved in the field of English language and literature in particular and interdisciplinary-crosscurrents in general. It features theoretical and interpretative peer-reviewed research articles from established and new authors.</p>
<p>English studies have proliferated like rhizome and now it involves a wide array of theoretical framework from various disciplines like psychology, sociology, folklore and anthropology, cultural studies, communication, education, teaching and learning pedagogy, linguistics, politics etcetera, thereby making its growth in multiple axis. This creates the post-postmodern condition, which can be understood with the need of the hour, the interdisciplinary approach, a way to understand and interpret the complex system that shapes and informs the pedagogy of English language and literature.</p>
<p>The journal features densely theoretical and analytical writing that focuses aspects of English language in any or all possible contexts, employing interdisciplinary approach to address / approach the research problems with methods of and insights borrowed from multiple established disciplines. We invite original unpublished work in the following areas: Teaching pedagogy, Aaspects of English Language Teaching, English Literature, Indian Writing in English, Postcolonial Literature, Critical Theories, Cultural Studies, Subaltern Studies, Folklore &amp; Translation Studies.</p>
Fri, 24 Jul 2015 23:52:32 -040063148 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduDisability in the Visual Sphere--abstract due 9/30/15, conference 3/17-20, 2016http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63145
<p>This panel seeks to explore the category of disability as something that is perceived and performed in the visual sphere. Papers might include discussions of voyeurism, spectacles and spectatorship, self-fashioning, visual art, undetectable or ambiguous disability, the body as evidence, erasure and exposure, sensory impairment, perception and interpretation, and questions of legibility and truth. Open to scholars working in any geographical region or period. </p>
<p>Please submit abstracts up to 300 words with a short (1-2 sentence) bio. DO NOT EMAIL YOUR ABSTRACT. You must go through the NeMLA site: </p>
<p><a href="https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/15938" title="https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/15938">https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/15938</a></p>
Fri, 24 Jul 2015 18:13:56 -040063145 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduWhat Devils Sayhttp://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63142
<p>Devils are everywhere in medieval literature, disturbing, challenging, and violating conventional spatio-temporal constraints as they move freely between worlds in order to torment the holy, spread disease, and tempt good Christians by making sin seem sweet. They appear as enchanters, tempters, playful tricksters, masked tormentors, terrifying beasts, mankind’s lawyerly accusers, and on occasion, as sympathetic figures who happened to be on the losing side of a cosmic war. Although much has been written about how devils are staged, their appearance, and their interaction with those they torment, very little has been written about what devils actually say. How do devils represent themselves and their spaces of punishment? When, how, and to whom do they speak? How does their rhetoric reflect social, cultural, and religious beliefs and practices in the Middle Ages? What do rhetorical gaps or silences signify? This panel focuses on what devils have to say not only about those they torment, but also about other devils, Satan, their hellish domain, and ultimately, about themselves. Papers that explore the rhetoric of devils and diabolical figures are welcome. </p>
<p>Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words and a completed Participant Information Form to Kathy Torabi (Texas A&amp;M University) at <a href="mailto:torabik@tamu.edu">torabik@tamu.edu</a>. Proposals should arrive by September 15, 2016. The Participant Information Form can be can be downloaded at: <a href="http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html" title="http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html">http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html</a>.</p>
Fri, 24 Jul 2015 16:34:52 -040063142 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduGower and Medicinehttp://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63129
<p>Recent innovations in narrative medicine, cognitive science, and theories of the body's experience of pain have opened up new paths of inquiry into literary work from the Middle Ages to our own postmodern moment. In an attempt to update and expand upon the early work of George G. Fox on John Gower's relation to and knowledge of the medieval sciences, Accessus seeks essays that focus on one or more of Gower's works in conjunction with medieval treatises, herbals, lapidaries, encyclopedias, health books, and other relevant materials. Essays might address Gower's deployment of metaphors of illness and healing, blindness, auditory impairment, diseases of the mouth, heart, brain, psychological-physiological disjunctions, traumatic injuries, the effects of pain on the human body, and the body of poetry that gives pain a voice. Essays of 20 pages or more, conforming to Chicago Notes and Bibliography Style, must be submitted by October 1, 2015 to the journal's homepage: <a href="http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/accessus/" title="http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/accessus/">http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/accessus/</a></p>
Thu, 23 Jul 2015 13:37:17 -040063129 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu'Hit iseie aboc iwrite': Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Vernacular Devotional Manuscripts (Kzoo 2016--deadline Sept. 15, 2015)http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63128
<p>The Early Middle English Society invites paper proposals for our session, “‘Hit iseie aboc iwrite’: Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Vernacular Devotional Manuscripts,” at the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, 12-15 May 2016. Vernacular texts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England often fall in the gap between the two major fields of literary study, Old English and Middle English. While these texts have begun to receive the scholarly attention they deserve, religious and devotional texts are too often marginalized as not “literary.”</p>
<p>We invite paper proposals that work to situate twelfth- and thirteenth-century devotional texts in their manuscript context, allowing us to assess these texts’ authorship, intended readership, use, and reuse. Manuscript studies often engage with questions of “use,” and Claire M. Waters’s presentation at Kalamazoo 2015 asked us to consider the way that medieval religious literature joins utilitarian and aesthetic aims. The question of “use” might prove to be a valuable organizing principle for this session, encompassing the didactic goals of devotional texts, the assemblage of newer and older devotional materials in miscellanies, and the way in which authors, scribes, and illuminators shape manuscript content to suit a particular audience. We are interested in a wide range of approaches to manuscript studies, including paleographical and codicological examinations of script, illumination, layout, and versification, as well as explorations of manuscripts’ orientation to space, place, and local identity. </p>
<p>According to our mission statement, the Early Middle English Society “seeks to promote the study and scholarly discussion of English literary and cultural production from the Norman Conquest to the mid-fourteenth century, especially in relation to the two areas that book-end ours: the Anglo-Saxon period and the Middle English period after the plague.” As a result, we invite proposals that explore how Early Middle English manuscripts relate to Anglo-Saxon and later Middle English literary and religious culture. In this session, we also strongly encourage papers that discuss non-English vernacular languages and their manuscripts, including Anglo-Norman and Celtic languages.</p>
<p>Please submit an abstract and Participant Information Form to Jenny C. Bledsoe (Emory University) at <a href="mailto:jcbleds@emory.edu">jcbleds@emory.edu</a> by September 15, 2015.</p>
Thu, 23 Jul 2015 13:25:18 -040063128 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduMedieval Graduate Student Symposium: At The University of North Texas March 3-4, 2016http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63100
<p>Sponsored by AVISTA </p>
<p>*******NEW******<br />
AVISTA Prize $200.<br />
For Best original, well-researched and rigorous and best represents aspects of AVISTA's scholarly mission. All abstracts selected for the symposium will be eligible.</p>
<p>Medieval Graduate Student Symposium<br />
At<br />
The University of North Texas<br />
March 3-4, 2016</p>
<p>Conference Theme:<br />
“The Technical Details of Everyday Life”<br />
Keynote Address:<br />
Nicola Coldstream<br />
“Behind the Scenes at a Medieval Entertainment”</p>
<p>Call for Papers<br />
Topics from Any Discipline, Any Time-- Late Antique to Early Renaissance<br />
Preference given to those that address the conference theme</p>
<p>Submit 300-word abstracts to:<br />
<a href="mailto:Mickey.Abel@unt.edu">Mickey.Abel@unt.edu</a><br />
Due October 1st, 2016</p>
<p>For further AVISTA news visit <a href="http://www.avista.org" title="www.avista.org">www.avista.org</a></p>
Wed, 22 Jul 2015 12:43:16 -040063100 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduThe Medieval “Freak Show”: Putting the Monstrous on Display in the Middle Ages (SEMA 2015 - Oct. 22-24, Little Rock)http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63094
<p>Session sponsored by mearcstapa<br />
SEMA (Southeast Medieval Association) Conference Oct. 22-24 in Little Rock, Arkansas</p>
<p>The Medieval “Freak Show”: Putting the Monstrous on Display in the Middle Ages</p>
<p>People and creatures perceived as monstrous or wondrous are often put on display for profit or exploitation. At times, this exhibitionism presents itself as “education.” What has popularly been called the “freak show” achieved its height via the emergence of working class entertainments that transformed visual cultures in the nineteenth century, as exemplified in P.T. Barnum’s circus and its sideshows, but also including innovations such as the stereoscope and the panorama, which prepared the rise of cinema and, later, television. </p>
<p>Yet these technologies only amplify traditions of the public display of human oddity and wonder stretching into the Middle Ages (and beyond): striking examples of extraordinary bodies and physical powers can be found in medieval saints’ lives, such as that of Christina Mirabilis, who could perch in trees like a bird, roll herself into a ball, and move at superhuman speed. She, or her hagiographer, puts her “wondrous” body on display to instruct and astound, yet may be aware of the sensationalism of her narrative. Likewise, medieval epic offers numerous examples of wondrous bodies, and exempla teem with people possessed by devils with the power of prognostication. These episodes are meant to instruct, but also to titillate, horrify, and shock their audiences. Similar paradigms mark displays on modern television, particularly in reality shows that walk (and frequently cross) the line between empowerment or awareness raising and exploitation. </p>
<p>We can thus understand then that the notion of “freak” in “freak show” requires display: fantastic physical attributes must be visible by way of exhibition, while other powers, such as prognostication, must be made worthy of display by way of spectacular shows and dramatic presentation. The “educational” aspect of the “freak show” is the most controversial and poignant aspect of the practice. The “freak” is understood to benefit the public through certain services or through instruction, although the content, quality, and validity of this instruction varies widely depending on a given culture. </p>
<p>The papers of the panel will discuss medieval instances of the “freak show,” along with the complex questions of power and otherness these engender. We are especially interested in papers that address the presentational and supposedly “educational” aspects of the “freak show,” while we welcome papers addressing any aspect of the phenomenon. Might we understand literary and artistic examples as forms of the “freak show”? What are the forms of display that characterize medieval cultures? How do medieval forms of display exhibit – or question – the typical goals of profit, exploitation, and edification?</p>
<p>Please send abstracts of 300 words to <a href="mailto:stefaniegoyette@gmail.com">stefaniegoyette@gmail.com</a> by 7/26</p>
Wed, 22 Jul 2015 11:03:32 -040063094 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduNew Journal: The Bulletin of International Association for Robin Hood Studieshttp://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63083
<p>The International Association for Robin Hood Studies (IARHS) is pleased to announce the creation of a new, peer-reviewed, open-access journal, The Bulletin of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies. The journal will be published bi-annually beginning in Spring 2016 and will be available on the IARHS’ website, Robin Hood Scholars: IARHS on the Web: <a href="http://robinhoodscholars.blogspot.com/" title="http://robinhoodscholars.blogspot.com/">http://robinhoodscholars.blogspot.com/</a>. Scholars are invited to send original research on any aspect of the Robin Hood tradition. The editors welcome essays in the following areas: formal literary explication, manuscript and early printed book investigations, historical inquiries, new media examinations, and theory / cultural studies approaches. We are looking for concise essays, 4,000-8,000-words long. Submissions should be formatted following the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. Submissions and queries should be directed to both Valerie B. Johnson (<a href="mailto:valerie.johnson@lmc.gatech.edu">valerie.johnson@lmc.gatech.edu</a>) and also Alexander L. Kaufman (<a href="mailto:akaufman@aum.edu">akaufman@aum.edu</a>).</p>
Tue, 21 Jul 2015 13:33:15 -040063083 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu"Remeasuring Lyrical Pain" -- Seminar CFP -- ACLA Annual Meeting, Cambridge, MA, March 17–20, 2016 http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63075
<p>In recent scholarship, lyric emerges as a privileged form for expressing, simulating, and circulating pain: its formal flexibility, non-narrative structure, and somatic elements allow lyric to evoke an embodied sensation whose "resistance to language," as Elaine Scarry memorably argues, “is essential to what it is.” Yet these characteristics do not adhere neatly to lyric. Not all lyrics are formally free and non-narrative. Furthermore, various literary genres employ the formal invention, non-narrative digressions, and somatic elements most often identified with the lyric form.</p>
<p>With this in mind, this seminar seeks papers that augment and complicate the understanding of the lyric as a uniquely fit vehicle for pained expression. Possible inquiries include: How might prescribed lyric forms obfuscate or enable painful expression? How might narrative gestures within lyrics enhance their capacity to express suffering? And how might other literary genres — including drama, the novel, and experimental prose poetry — employ otherwise “lyrical” elements to create their own modes of expressing pain?</p>
<p>A note on ACLA's paper proposal policy: ACLA's paper submission portal opens on September 1 and closes September 23. Scholars interested in submitting a paper are encouraged to contact organizers prior to this period. If you are considering submitting a paper to this panel, please contact Jessica Tabak at <a href="mailto:Jessica_Tabak@brown.edu">Jessica_Tabak@brown.edu</a> and Matthew Beach at <a href="mailto:Matthew_Beach@brown.edu">Matthew_Beach@brown.edu</a></p>
Mon, 20 Jul 2015 22:30:33 -040063075 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduJews and Christian Materiality 51st International Congress in Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan (May 12-15, 2016)http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63073
<p>In the conclusion to her Christian Materiality (2011), Caroline Walker Bynum opens the door to an expansion of her discussion of medieval materiality and religion to Judaism and Islam: “Understanding the full materiality of Christian belief and practice," she says, "may help to clarify at least one of the ways [i.e., the material way] in which medieval Christianity (and, in certain aspects, its modern descendants) is similar to, yet differs from, its sister religions, Islam and Judaism” (273). This session proposes to go beyond Bynum's brief concluding survey, focusing specifically on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. The rational for the focus is the well-documented tendency in Christian thought to present Judaism as the “material other” to Christian spirituality. On the one hand, many accounts of debates between Jews and Christians turn on the kind of generative matter Bynum describes in her book. On the other hand, the idea that Jews, bound to a literal reading of scripture, are blind to the spirit even as they physically bear their scriptures to the corners of the earth, is based on the spirit/matter binary that Bynum’s work problematizes. As much recent work on materiality has radically changed how we think of medieval Christianity’s relationship to the material, it makes sense to rethink how this impacts thinking about Jews and Judaism. The revaluation cannot be one-sided, however, not just about how Christians related to Jews; it must also involve a rethinking of Jews and “holy matter” as well. Christian “holy matter” surrounded Jews---on the outside of cathedrals and churches, displayed in processions, even in Jewish illuminated books--and Jewish natural philosophers drew on the same theories of the natural world as their Christian counterparts. On the other hand Judaism (at least as in the form dominant in the middle ages) grew out of a different ontological attitudes toward the spirit/matter hierarchy than did Christianity (at least in theory); it embraced the material and did not view it as negatively as early Christians, a rabbinic stance that influenced medieval descendants. Might the new understanding of medieval Christian materiality change how we understand the medieval Jewish attitude toward the material too? How does it inform, or react to, Jewish attitudes toward holy matter? </p>
<p>This session invites papers that rethink medieval Judaism in light of the material turn and the new materialisms generally, either from the perspective of Christianity (how did Christians relate to Jews and materiality?), or from the Jewish perspective (how does our changing understanding of materiality in the surrounding Christian culture apply to, or contrast with, our understanding of medieval Jewish culture?). Ideally, this session will stimulate discussion between people working in diverse topics and fields. It is a chance to make use of the varied audiences and disciplinary foci of a big conference like Kalamazoo, and it seeks to make space for fruitful and unpredictable interactions.</p>
<p>Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to <a href="mailto:sboyarin@uvic.ca">sboyarin@uvic.ca</a> by Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2015.</p>
Mon, 20 Jul 2015 17:43:55 -040063073 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduJEWISH WOMEN IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND (ROUNDTABLE) - KALAMAZOO, 12-15 MAY 2016http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63071
<p>It is generally accepted that there are few post-biblical Jewish women in medieval Christian art. When they are depicted, their Jewishness is usually unmarked; where they appear in narrative, they are often passive or eventual converts; they lack the anti-Jewish stereotypes so often associated with Jewish males. Sara Lipton has argued that this is partly because “the Jewess’s femaleness trumped her Jewishness” (“Where are the Jewish Women?” in <em>Dark Mirror</em>, 2014). At the same time, Jewish women are ubiquitous in the legal and historical records of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. As Michael Adler put it in 1934, looking primarily at Jewish Exchequer rolls, the Jewess “occupied a position in the life of the Jewry, both within and without the community, probably unequalled in those days in any country” (“The Jewish Woman in Medieval England”). At the same time again, Jewish Studies scholars have had a hard time imagining medieval Anglo-Jewish women’s intellectual and religious lives with any particularity, since most cultural evidence of Jewish life in medieval England was destroyed, carried away, appropriated, or unpreserved after the 1290 Expulsion (e.g., see Elisheva Baumgarten’s introductory notes on the difficulty of using English sources in both <em>Mothers and Children</em> and <em>Practicing Piety</em>). Influential as she was, the medieval Anglo-Jewish woman survives in a complex, limited, and trauma-stained range of sources that are most often (though not exclusively) Christian. Despite the fine work of Adler, Barrie Dobson, and Suzanne Bartlet (among others), it remains the case that she is often studied from or as absence, and there is little awareness of medieval Anglo-Jewish women among scholars of medieval English history and literature generally. This session seeks not only to interrogate the current state of scholarship, but also to explore how multiple sources and disciplines might be creatively employed to develop new readings of the presence, power, and meaning of the Jewish woman in medieval England. Short papers from multiple perspectives are invited: legal, historiographical, art historical, literary, or archeological research are welcome, as are reflections on historical presence and/or literary or symbolic afterlives, work on multiple languages, and, crucially, work from both Christian and Jewish perspectives.</p>
Mon, 20 Jul 2015 16:34:41 -040063071 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduUCLA Comparative Literature Graduate Student Conferencehttp://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63067
<p>The uneasy boundary between madness and love asserts itself throughout recorded history. The shifting relationship between these two phenomena exists across most (if not all) societies and epochs, particularly in literature and art. From lovesickness in the Middle Ages, to nymphomania and hysteria in the Enlightenment, to the stalker in modern-day horror films, the line between love and madness is continually conflated, contested, and blurred. </p>
<p>In keeping with recent critical attention to the history of the passions and the body, we are interested in the aesthetic representation - literary, visual, and oral - of love madness. How are these extreme states represented in literature and art? Where is the line drawn between passionate love and mad love? How has the representation of love and/or/as madness changed over time? What effect have these representations had on real-world treatment of the mentally ill? And how is space left for mad love as a positive force, if at all? </p>
<p>This year’s UCLA Comparative Literature Graduate Conference will explore the many manifestations of mad love in literature and cultural history. We invite graduate students to present papers on related issues. Topics on the intersections between social conceptions and artistic depictions of love and madness might include, but are not restricted to:</p>
<p>● Love as a disease<br />
● Love, madness, and psychoanalysis<br />
● Bodies performing desire<br />
● Love, madness, and identity<br />
● Gendering desire and/or madness<br />
● Love, madness, and violence<br />
● Monstrous love<br />
● Creative production/inspiration and love/madness<br />
● The role of the sensory in love and madness<br />
● Mental Health and Human Rights</p>
<p>We are open to papers in all disciplines and treating material from all time periods. In addition to conventional panel presentations, we will offer performances and film screenings; interactive workshops on topics such as the history of psychiatry and an introduction to translation; and discussion sections on pre-circulated materials (primary and/or secondary). </p>
<p>Submission Guidelines:<br />
Please submit your 250-300 word proposal/abstract and a CV to <a href="mailto:ucla.complit.conf@gmail.com">ucla.complit.conf@gmail.com</a> by Monday, September 21st. Kindly mention “Submission: CLGraduate Conference” in the subject of the e-mail. All submissions should include the title of the paper, the abstract, and the name, affiliation, and contact information of the author. Please specify whether you are interested in (a) presenting a paper or (b) presenting/performing a creative work. If you are proposing a creative work, please specify any A/V needs and the length of the presentation.</p>
<p>Further information is available on the conference website at uclacomplitconf.com. For any additional queries, please contact <a href="mailto:ucla.complit.conf@gmail.com">ucla.complit.conf@gmail.com</a>.</p>
Mon, 20 Jul 2015 13:09:03 -040063067 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduGender and Emotion: Gender and Medieval Studies Conference 2016, University of Hull, 6th - 8th January 2016http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63062
<p>The grief-stricken faces at Edward’s deathbed in the Bayeux Tapestry; the ambiguous ‘ofermod’ in The Battle of Maldon; the body-crumpling anguish of the Virgin witnessing the Man of Sorrows; the mirth of the Green Knight; the apoplectic anger of the mystery plays’ Herod and the visceral visionary experiences of Margery of Kempe all testify to the ways in which the medieval world sought to express, perform, idealise and understand emotion.</p>
<p>Yet while such expressions of emotion are frequently encountered by medievalists working across the disciplines, defining, quantifying and analysing the purposes of emotion and its relationship to gender often proves difficult. Are personal items placed in early Anglo Saxon graves a means for the living to let go of, or perpetuate emotion, and how are these influenced by the body in the grave? Do different literary and historical forms lend themselves to diverse ways of expressing men’s and women’s emotion? How does a character expressing emotion on stage or in artwork use body, gender and articulation to communicate emotion to their viewer? Moreover, is emotion viewed differently depending on the gendered identity of the body expressing it? Is emotion and its reception used to construct, deconstruct, challenge or confirm gender identities?</p>
<p>This conference seeks to explore the manifestations, performances and functions of emotion in the early to late Middle Ages, and to examine the ways in which emotion is gendered and used to construct gender identities. </p>
<p>Proposals are now being accepted for 20 minute papers. Topics to consider may include, but are not limited to:</p>
<p>• Gender and emotional expression: representing and performing emotion<br />
• The emotional body<br />
• Philosophies of emotion: theory and morality<br />
• Emotional objects and vessels of emotion<br />
• Language and emotion and the languages of emotion<br />
• Preserving or perpetuating emotion<br />
• Emotions to be dealt with: repressing, curtailing, channelling, transforming<br />
• Forbidden emotion<br />
• Living through (someone else’s) emotion<br />
• The emotions of war and peace<br />
• The emotive ‘other’<br />
• Place and emotion<br />
• Queer emotion</p>
<p>We welcome scholars from a range of disciplines, including history, literature, art history, archaeology and drama. A travel fund is available for postgraduate students who would otherwise be unable to attend.</p>
<p>Please email proposals of no more than 300 words to organiser Daisy Black at <a href="mailto:d.black@hull.ac.uk">d.black@hull.ac.uk</a> by the 7th September 2015. All queries should also be directed to this address. Please also include biographical information detailing your name, research area, institution and level of study (if applicable).</p>
<p>Further details will be available on the conference website:<br />
<a href="http://www.medievalgender.co.uk" title="www.medievalgender.co.uk">www.medievalgender.co.uk</a></p>
Mon, 20 Jul 2015 09:27:12 -040063062 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu[Update] Image Matter: Art and Materiality (AAH New Voices conference); Manchester, 6 Nov 2015http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63060
<p>Image Matter: Art and Materiality<br />
AAH Students New Voices Conference<br />
MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University<br />
6 November 2015</p>
<p>Keynotes: Professor Carol Mavor (University of Manchester) and Professor Hanneke Grootenboer (University of Oxford)</p>
<p>Call for Papers</p>
<p>How do art historians interpret matter? And how about artists, makers, theorists and critics? Much recent art historical and visual culture literature has argued for the reinstatement of the bodily and the material in art and its encounter, rejecting the pre-eminence of a disembodied eye in favour of a wider range of somatic responses: touching, hearing, tasting, smelling. Similarly, the material physicality of the art object in its myriad forms—surface, texture, weight, spatial extension, sound etc—has recaptured our attention.</p>
<p>New Voices 2015 will explore approaches to materiality and the material in light of developing discourses that implicate art history, as well as visual and material culture studies. Even if there has been a ‘material turn’, James Elkins (2008) argues that art history remains fearful of the material: ‘art history, visual studies, Bildwissenschaft, and art theory take an interest in materiality provided that the examples of materiality remain at an abstract or general level …’. If the sensorium of seeing, tasting, feeling and hearing exceeds the rationality of disciplinary categories and the systematisation of knowledge, how can writing about and through art accommodate affective objects? How have artists negotiated the conflict of a spectatorship, which disregards hapticity, surface and substance? How do traditions of connoisseurship engage with contemporary theories of materiality?</p>
<p>As a ‘somaesthetic’ approach of beholding (re)gains currency the primacy of sight decreases (for example, in the re evaluation of medieval artefacts that were touched, kissed and smelled). </p>
<p>Alternatively, vision may at least be understood as opening haptic and experiential exchanges between object and maker, object and viewer. But perhaps the questionable pre-eminence of visuality also evidences an increased derogation of manual labour in lieu of what is perceived as more cerebral, more elevated from the yucky material of bodily production. New Voices 2015 takes place within the intellectual and creative space of the art school, the messy realm of art production. It therefore asks how (the) material and its associated places of production and ‘consumption’—from the studio to the gallery—can be integrated in the discourses of art history and its objects.</p>
<p>New Voices welcomes contributions from all periods and contexts which address the relationship between visual and material studies and practices. Topics may include, but are not limited to:</p>
<p>• Haptic encounters with artworks (incl. performative, virtual, conceptual works)<br />
• Historiographic reflections on attitudes towards material(ity)<br />
• Explorations on the relationships between visuality and materiality<br />
• Historiographic and methodological approaches to the material of art (and its making)<br />
• Social, technological, historical and cultural contextualisations of the material turn<br />
• Art and materiality in a digital age<br />
Abstracts of no more than 300 words for 20-minute papers should be submitted along with a 100-word biographical note to <a href="mailto:ImageMatterAAH@gmail.com">ImageMatterAAH@gmail.com</a> by 1 August 2015. Although the conference is open to all, speakers are required to be AAH members. Convenors: Liz Mitchell, Rosalinda Quintieri, Tilo Reifenstein and Charlotte Stokes.</p>
<p>Online: <a href="http://aah.org.uk/events/new-voices-conferences" title="http://aah.org.uk/events/new-voices-conferences">http://aah.org.uk/events/new-voices-conferences</a></p>
Mon, 20 Jul 2015 05:55:24 -040063060 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduScience Fiction in the Middle Ages and the Middle Ages in Science Fiction -- NeMLA 2016 Panel (Hartford, CT)http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63053
<p>Medieval European literature played a defining role in the development of modern fantasy fiction, and genre fantasy has already received a great deal of critical attention in the academic study of medievalism. By comparison, the complex relationship of genre science fiction to the Middle Ages has been sorely understudied, and this session will include papers that consider either or both of the topics in its title, that is, on the one hand, the appearance or influence of "the medieval," broadly conceived, in modern science fiction. Such papers might examine how certain works of SF (re)construct the medieval: fruitful examples would include a text like Frank Herbert's Dune, where neo-feudalism prevails; time travel novels in which contemporary characters return to an imagined Middle Ages; SF narratives written by medievalists (such as C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy); or space operas that follow romance or folkloric formulae. Alternatively, papers in search of "science fiction in the Middle Ages" might apply to medieval texts concepts central to the academic study of science fiction -- Darko Suvin's "cognitive estrangement," Fredric Jameson's theory of utopia, and so on -- or examine any set of medieval discourses, impulses, or individual works that might be productively understood as some kind of equivalent to contemporary SF. Examples here might include dream visions in which the narrator traverses the celestial spheres, tales of impossible gadgets, or narratives of alchemical success or folly. Finally, papers that argue from a perspective denying the compatibility of the medieval worldview and the rationalist-empiricist discourse of science fiction would also be welcome. This session will advance our understanding of the place of (proto-)science in medieval fictions, but also attempt to account for the frequent reappearance of the medieval in the distinctly modern science fiction genre, which often takes pride in its modernity and defines itself against pre-Enlightenment epistemologies.</p>
<p>-Abstract Submission Deadline: September 30th, 2015</p>
<p>-Submissions must be made using the NeMLA website: <a href="https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/cfp" title="https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/cfp">https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/cfp</a></p>
Sun, 19 Jul 2015 16:13:39 -040063053 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduLacunae: Noticing What Is Not There - Kalamazoo 2016http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63045
<p>The Canadian Society of Medievalists invites abstracts for 20-minute papers for its session, "Lacunae: Noticing What Is Not There", to be held at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI in May 2016. In doing so, we hope to delve into the productive possibilities for medievalists of paying attention to what is missing. Textual scholars may be particularly familiar with the physical problem of absent sections of text, missing leaves or illegible scripts obscured by damage or decay to the manuscript but these kinds of lacunae are not the only ones that scholars encounter. Deliberate poetic silences, anonymous authorship, even evidence missing from the archive box all throw up challenges to researchers tasked with imagining a whole, sometimes when there are only holes. This session aims to query the nature of absence both by considering the broad array of lacunae--physical and figurative, intentional and accidental--that scholars encounter and the myriad strategies we have for responding to those lacunae. We hope to generate discussion of the philosophical and practical predicament of dwelling in empty spaces and, importantly, what happens when scholars mind the gap.</p>
<p>Please send a 300-word abstract and a Participant Information Form (found here: <a href="http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF" title="http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF">http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF</a>) to <a href="mailto:stephanie.morley@smu.ca">stephanie.morley@smu.ca</a> by 15 September 2015.</p>
<p>Stephanie Morley<br />
Saint Mary's University<br />
Department of English<br />
Halifax, NS B3H 3C3<br />
Tel: 902-420-5719<br />
Fax: 902-420-5110</p>
Sat, 18 Jul 2015 13:43:24 -040063045 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduLoving and Hating Lydgate - Kalamazoo 2016 http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63020
<p>In its five hundred years of reception, responses to John Lydgate’s poetry have varied between extremes. Early regard for Lydgate appears in such places as Stephen Hawes’ Pastime of Pleasure, where the monk is canonized alongside Chaucer and Gower and at greater length than either of the other poets. By contrast, Joseph Ritson describes Lydgate in 1802 as a “voluminous, prosaick, and driveling monk.” This comment has formed a flashpoint in Lydgate studies for both those who would dismiss and those who would defend this poet. Renoir, Schirmer, Pearsall, and Patterson provide a wide-ranging sampling of these perspectives. The emotional element of these perspectives continues to characterize much of the discussion of Lydgate as scholars have begun to reassess his work in the last few decades. But what has caused these extreme swings in perception of Lydgate? This session will seek insight into this question through papers that examine historical and historiographical shifts in how Lydgate has been perceived. Its focus will be not so much on reasons to “love” or “hate” Lydgate as shifts between how his work has been received. </p>
<p>Individuals interested in giving a paper for this session should submit a one page abstract and completed Participant Information Form (PIF) to Alaina Bupp (University of Colorado Boulder) and Tim Jordan (Ohio University Zanesville) at <a href="mailto:lydgatesociety@gmail.com">lydgatesociety@gmail.com</a>. Paper proposals should arrive by September 1, 2015. Copies of the PIF can be downloaded from the congress’s webpage: <a href="http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html" title="http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html">http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html</a>.</p>
Thu, 16 Jul 2015 20:04:00 -040063020 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduLydgate as Formal Innovator - Kalamazoo 2016 sponsored sessionhttp://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63019
<p>While historicist approaches to Lydgate have played a large role in the poet’s now decades-old critical recuperation, all along this recuperation has also been alert to the formal dimensions of his work and to some of the many ways these dimensions represent innovations. Studies by, for example, Maura Nolan and Claire Sponsler have fruitfully combined historical inquiry with explorations of the ramifications of form. With many in the field of literary study seeking, in a variety of ways, to return considerations of form to the center court of the field’s endeavors, it is an apt moment to extend, complicate, and/or critique accounts of Lydgate as a formal innovator. This session seeks papers that consider Lydgate’s poetic practice or theory in this regard—whether in particular works, genres, or across his oeuvre—or that reflect on the idea of Lydgate as a formal innovator within the critical tradition on the poet, within late medieval literary study more generally, or in relation to larger critical trends.</p>
<p>Individuals interested in giving a paper for this session should submit a one page abstract and completed Participant Information Form (PIF) to Alaina Bupp (University of Colorado Boulder) and Tim Jordan (Ohio University Zanesville) at <a href="mailto:lydgatesociety@gmail.com">lydgatesociety@gmail.com</a>. Paper proposals should arrive by September 1, 2015. Copies of the PIF can be downloaded from the congress’s webpage: <a href="http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html" title="http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html">http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html</a>.</p>
Thu, 16 Jul 2015 20:02:32 -040063019 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduThe Senses in Medieval & Renaissance Europe: Sight and Visual Perception http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63018
<p>Deadline: 8 November 2015</p>
<p>Proposals for papers are invited for The Senses in Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Sight and Visual Perception, which aims to provide an international and interdisciplinary forum for researchers with an interest in the history of the senses in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.<br />
The history of the senses is a rapidly expanding field of research. Pioneered in Early Modern and Modern studies, it is now attracting attention also from Medieval and Renaissance specialists. Preoccupation with the human senses and with divine control over them is evident in a range of narrative texts, scientific treatises, creative literature, as well as the visual arts and music from the pre-modern period. This conference – the first in a series devoted to the five senses – aims to contribute to this expansion by bringing together leading researchers to exchange ideas and approaches.</p>
<p>The theme of the inaugural meeting is ‘Sight and Visual Perception’. Sight has been chosen as the first topic for investigation as it was considered the primary sense and was treated as an abstract philosophical and religious concept in many medieval texts. But the study of sight can also provide insights into various aspects of medieval society: ‘eye-witness’ descriptions; sight impairment and the care of the blind; deprivation of sight as punishment or revenge; the development of spectacles and other optical aids; ideas about colours and their significance; ‘second sight’ as manifested in visions and apparitions; the concept of ‘the gaze’ in visual arts. The conference aims to address these and other themes and to foster interaction between established and younger scholars working in the area.</p>
<p>Keynote Speakers</p>
<p>Professor Elizabeth Robertson, University of Glasgow </p>
<p> Professor Chris Woolgar, University of Southampton</p>
<p>Professor Robertson’s research and publications are concerned with vernacular theology, medieval poetics, literacy in the Middle Ages, and gender and religion in Middle English literature. Her recent work has focused on vision and touch in devotional literature. With J. Jahner she edited Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Objects in Global Perspective: Translations of the Sacred for theNew Middle Ages series (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010). This collection contains her important paper, ‘Julian of Norwich’s Unmediated Vision’.</p>
<p>Professor Woolgar’s research and publications are concerned with the social and economic history of late-medieval England and in particular with the evidence contained in domestic household accounts. He is the author of The Senses in Late Medieval England (Yale, 2007) and co-author of A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages, 500–1450, ed. Richard Newhauser (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).</p>
<p>Contributions on any aspect of the conference theme of ‘Sight and Visual Perception’ are welcomed from established and early career scholars as well as postgraduates. Proposals for panels are also warmly encouraged. Titles and abstracts (maximum 300 words) together with a short biography, institutional affiliation and contact details, should be forwarded to <a href="mailto:medrenforum@gmail.com">medrenforum@gmail.com</a> by 8 November 2015.</p>
<p>The conference is organised by Edward Coleman, School of History, UCD and the Forum for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Ireland. It is generously supported by UCD Seed Funding.</p>
<p>Organizing Committee:<br />
Dr Edward Coleman (University College Dublin)<br />
Dr Ann Buckley (Queen’s University Belfast / Trinity College Dublin)<br />
Dr Carrie Griffin (University of Bristol)<br />
Dr Emer Purcell (University College Cork)</p>
<p>Forum for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Ireland (FMRSI)<br />
Web: <a href="http://www.fmrsi.wordpress.com" title="www.fmrsi.wordpress.com">www.fmrsi.wordpress.com</a><br />
Email: <a href="mailto:medrenforum@gmail.com">medrenforum@gmail.com</a></p>
<p>Facebook: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ForumMRSI" title="https://www.facebook.com/ForumMRSI">https://www.facebook.com/ForumMRSI</a> Twitter: @FMRSI</p>
Thu, 16 Jul 2015 17:53:02 -040063018 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduFanfiction in Medieval Studies @ 51st International Congress in Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 12-15, 2016http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63017
<p>Panel: Fanfiction In Medieval Studies<br />
Conference: 51st International Congress in Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan (May 12-15, 2016)<br />
Organizer: Anna Wilson</p>
<p>Over the past three decades, there has been increasing interest in both Fan Studies and Medieval Studies in the relationship between medieval literary culture and fanfiction (that is, popular, ‘unofficial’, fan-generated fiction writing that participates in a pre-existing fictional ‘universe’ and uses its characters). Many Fan Studies scholars have seen fanfiction as the heir to the premodern literary tradition in which authors adapt, rework, reinterpret or otherwise engages with a pre-existing literary work. These arguments often refer to the Aeneid’s reworking of Homer, romances in the Alexander or Arthurian traditions, or specific works, such as Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid or Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, as ‘early fan fiction’. Fanfiction scholars have also claimed the medieval ‘active reader’, whose creativity spilled into glosses, commentaries and exegesis, as part of the history of fanfiction writers. However, there is currently little reflection on what this comparison might mean for medievalists. Can this analogy generate new readings of medieval literature texts or communities? How can we build a productive comparison between fanfiction and medieval literatures while retaining a sense of individual historical contexts and avoiding over-simplification?</p>
<p>This session invites papers that reflect on points of analogy between fanfiction and medieval literatures. Close-readings and case studies are welcome, but papers should ideally include attention to methodology. Papers might discuss: interest in amateur medievalisms, affect, volunteer labour, community formation on social media, the ‘active reader’ and marginalia, remix culture, gendered reading, the digital humanities, the erosion of the line between ‘public’ medievalism and that of the academy, fanfiction and pedagogy, and the question of relevance. </p>
<p>For further reading in Fan Studies, an up-to-date bibliography is maintained on Zotero, affiliated with the journal Transformative Works and Cultures. It can be found here: <a href="https://www.zotero.org/groups/11806" title="https://www.zotero.org/groups/11806">https://www.zotero.org/groups/11806</a>.</p>
<p>Please submit abstracts of 300 words or less, and a Participation Information Form (available here: <a href="http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF" title="http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF">http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF</a>) to Anna Wilson (<a href="mailto:anna.wilson@utoronto.ca">anna.wilson@utoronto.ca</a>).</p>
<p>Deadline: September 15th 2015</p>
Thu, 16 Jul 2015 13:06:47 -040063017 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduCFP: "A Feel for the Text: Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice" (Edited collection)http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63015
<p>Ever since Massumi posited the autonomy of affect and Sedgwick called for us to pay more attention to the felt “texture” of experience, there has been a surge of interest across the humanities and social sciences in how we are affected by and affect our environments. Affect theorists share an interest in the contingencies of being and in a model of becoming, offering an ontology that accounts for the complexities of lived experience and that promises a space for freedom resistant to the prisonhouse of discourse, to normative ideology, to state thinking. </p>
<p>So far little work has emerged that applies the insights of affect theory to literary analysis or that appraises the usefulness of affect theory to the literary critic. Aiming to address this gap, this collection seeks essays that consider the explanatory power affect theory might offer us. What are the contours of affective experience captured in literary texts, the intensities of embodied being that often escape the attention of the critic? What are the limits of representation, especially as regards fictional characters by definition removed from the quickenings of affect that impinge on physical bodies? What are the sensual resonances, the aesthetic engagements, the affective investments of readers and writers? What identities, what affective assemblages—queer, hybrid, transnational—take shape in the spaces opened by heightened emotion? How might accounting for the circulation of affective energies deepen—or even move us beyond—the insights of cultural materialist, feminist, or postcolonial readings? If in the past decades criticism has been driven by a hermeneutics of suspicion, how might attending to affect open a way to a more hopeful critique? Finally, to what extent could or should a turn to affect supplant the turn to discourse, and what are the implications for political critique of calls to embrace a more reparative project by theorists who tend to conceive of affect as pre-personal, as non-representational, and thus as resistant to analysis? </p>
<p>Contributors are encouraged to consider the relevance of any strain of theory to literary analysis, to textual production, to print culture. History of emotions approaches in dialogue with affect theory (its current lights, its foundational figures) are most welcome, especially those that in historicizing earlier representations of impassioned bodies in literary texts offer perspective on conceptions of affect in circulation today.</p>
<p>Palgrave Macmillan has expressed initial interest in publishing this project as part of the new series “Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism.” Please email a 500 word abstract and brief cv as attachments to <a href="mailto:stephen.ahern@acadiau.ca">stephen.ahern@acadiau.ca</a> by 1 October 2015. </p>
<p>Stephen Ahern<br />
Professor of English<br />
Acadia University</p>
Thu, 16 Jul 2015 11:57:19 -040063015 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu2nd Annual Literature and Social Justice Graduate Conferencehttp://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/62988
<p>The Lehigh English Department’s second annual Literature and Social Justice Graduate Conference will take place on Lehigh’s campus in Bethlehem, PA, on March 4th-5th, 2016. We will be accepting proposals from Master’s and Doctoral students on this year's conference theme, public humanities. Public humanities takes literature and social justice out of the confines of the classroom or academic publication by balancing theoretical concepts with practical actions and projects that benefit others in order to expand participation in and appreciation for the humanities. In addition to those papers that focus on literature and the role of the English department within public humanities, we are also open to papers that address the many diverse topics within the intersection of literature and social justice. This call is open to scholars working in all time periods, genres, and theoretical approaches. Potential topics related to the public humanities theme include but are not limited to:</p>
<p>--the interplay of academia, literature, and public outreach<br />
--online venues for public humanities<br />
--literacy and literature in the academy vs in the public sphere<br />
--public outreach and access to the humanities<br />
--public radio/public broadcasting/podcasts<br />
--service learning through literature<br />
--the university’s responsibility to the community<br />
--public histories/storytelling and community engagement<br />
--museums, archives, collections, and sites<br />
--documentaries and representing the voices of others<br />
--concepts of audience<br />
--public humanities and the literature curriculum<br />
--teaching literature beyond the traditional classroom<br />
--literary and interdisciplinary collaborations for public humanities</p>
<p>Graduate students should submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to Laura Kremmel and Dashielle Horn at <a href="mailto:LSJLehigh@gmail.com">LSJLehigh@gmail.com</a> by October 15th, 2015. Check back at the conference website for updates: <a href="http://lsjlehigh.weebly.com/" title="http://lsjlehigh.weebly.com/">http://lsjlehigh.weebly.com/</a>.</p>
Tue, 14 Jul 2015 14:48:24 -040062988 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduCFP: Dissecting the Page: Medical Paratexts Conference, Glasgow, Friday 11 Sept 2015http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/62981
<p>Dissecting the Page: Medical Paratexts<br />
Sir Alwyn Williams Building, Lilybank Gardens<br />
University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ<br />
9am-6pm, Friday 11 September 2015</p>
<p>This interdisciplinary conference draws together two emerging and complementary areas of research in the medical humanities: book history (as it pertains to medical texts), and the study of medical paratexts. We understand paratext as the apparatus of graphic communication: title pages, prefaces, illustrations, marginalia, and publishing details which act as mediators between text and reader. Discussing the development of medical paratexts across scribal, print and digital media, from the medieval period to the twenty-first century, the conference will take place on Friday 11 September 2015 at the University of Glasgow.</p>
<p>From Christina Lee’s discovery of the MRSA-combatting properties of an Anglo-Saxon recipe, to the increasing popularity of Ian Williams’ Graphic Medicine as a teaching tool for medical students, current research into the intersections between medicine, text, and image is producing dynamic and unexpected results (Thorpe: 2015; Lee: 2014; Taavitsainen: 2010; Couser: 2009; Cioffi: 2009; Díaz-Vera: 2009). With this conference, our keynote speakers will encompass collections-based approaches to medical humanities research (Prof. Jeremy Smith); the use of modern medical knowledge to inform medieval material research (Dr Deborah Thorpe); and creative approaches to medical humanities and contemporary medical practice. Recent years have seen several conferences and publications on paratextual research, and a range of events orientated around literature and medicine, but there is little crossover between the two fields. We propose that the breadth of research into medical book history in the medieval and early-modern period will prompt productive and innovative overlaps with work on modern medical paratexts and graphic novels. By focusing exclusively on medical paratexts, our aim is to establish an interdisciplinary network of scholars interested in graphic communication and medical practice. In addition to our keynote speakers and roundtable discussion, Glasgow’s Special Collections department have agreed to curate a display of medical marvels, medieval to modern, to coincide with the conference.</p>
<p>We are now looking for academics, artists, and medical professionals of all levels, periods, and fields to present their papers and to participate in the discussions that this conference aims to facilitate. Successful abstracts will be pre-circulated on the conference website and associated Twitter feed in advance of the conference. There are two travel bursaries available for postgraduate and/or ECR presenters; the recipients of these grants will be asked to write a short reflection on the conference, which will be published on the MHRC blog and the conference website. We also intend to publish an edited collection, to which conference speakers will be invited to contribute. </p>
<p>We invite papers on topics that include (but are not limited to):</p>
<p>the role of the medical preface<br />
graphic medicine in popular culture<br />
medicine, illness, and/or disability and graphic novels<br />
the development and role of medical (and medicalised) illustrations<br />
the advertising and placement of texts depicting medicine/illness/disability<br />
complex publications: overlaps between literature, art, theology, and medicine<br />
the development of paratext in medical texts from script to print<br />
the use and readers of medical texts<br />
auto/biography and medicine</p>
<p>Please email an abstract of up to 300 words and a short bio to the conference organisers (<a href="mailto:medicalparatexts@gmail.com">medicalparatexts@gmail.com</a>) by Thursday 30th July. If you wish to be considered for one of the PG/ECR bursaries, please email us for an application form and submit it with your abstract and bio. We will contact all respondents on the outcome of their proposal by Friday 7th August. Thanks to funding from the Wellcome Trust, this conference will be free to attend.</p>
<p>The conference venue, the Sir Alwyn Williams Building, is fully accessible. If you have any questions, please email the organising committee (Dr Hannah Tweed, Dr Diane Scott, and Dr Johanna Green) at <a href="mailto:medicalparatexts@gmail.com">medicalparatexts@gmail.com</a>, or contact us via @ParatextMatters.</p>
Tue, 14 Jul 2015 13:17:29 -040062981 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu[UPDATE] Transforming Male Devotional Practices from the Medieval to the Early Modern, 16th and 17th September 2015http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/62966
<p>Keynote speaker announced: Professor Anthony Bale (Birkbeck, University of London)</p>
<p>Extended deadline for abstracts: 20th July 2015</p>
<p>The extended deadline reflects the interest we have received in wider European male experience. We now welcome papers that focus on British and European devotion. This conference is co-hosted with the Universities of Reading and Liverpool Hope. It aims to explore the social, economic and spatial factors underpinning the changing way men demonstrated their commitment to God and the church(es) in a period of significant turmoil. Papers that address male devotional experience from historical, literary, gender studies and material culture perspectives are welcomed. Suggested themes include: </p>
<p>- Religion and Society: Domestic piety and lay/household Catholicism.<br />
- Material Culture and ritual objects.<br />
- The economy of piety: indulgences, relics and paying for piety.<br />
- Personal and public piety: Continuity and change over the medieval and early modern periods.<br />
- Devotional reading, writing and performance.<br />
- Geography, place and space in Catholic piety. </p>
<p>It is anticipated that selected papers will be published as part of an edited collection.</p>
Tue, 14 Jul 2015 04:09:49 -040062966 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduLogic & Letters: Reason as Literary Method, NeMLA 2016, Hartford, CThttp://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/62965
<p>This panel focuses on the classical through the early modern periods, and seeks to discuss some of the cognitive frameworks that are either behind, or can be translated, into reading and writing. Particular priority is given to reason and specific logical systems, from Aristotelian to Baconian (and more!). Suggested topics include, but are not limited to: reader or writer as scientist; philosophies/frameworks of reading; and logical systems as literary methodologies.</p>
<p>For details and abstract submission, please see the NeMLA website:<br />
<a href="http://www.cfplist.com//nemla/Home/S/15812" title="http://www.cfplist.com//nemla/Home/S/15812">http://www.cfplist.com//nemla/Home/S/15812</a></p>
<p>The deadline is September 30, 2015.</p>
Mon, 13 Jul 2015 23:34:14 -040062965 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduHorror (ACLA 2016 Seminar Proposal, March 17th-20th, Harvard University)http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/62960
<p>Horror</p>
<p>ACLA 2016 Seminar Proposal<br />
March 17th-20th, Harvard University</p>
<p>What would it mean to think and read with horror? What would a turn to horror look like, and what might its implications be for critical practice? Building on recent work by Eugene Thacker, Dylan Trigg, Graham Harman, Ben Woodard, and Thomas Ligotti, among others, this seminar seeks to situate horror as a site for new critical inquiry. Like other genre categories (Western, Romance, Mystery), horror fiction and film have been traditionally denigrated as “popular,” “low,” and “underground,” despite changing conceptions of canonicity and challenges to the “high/low” divide. As Harman suggests when he challenges Edmund Wilson’s reductive reading of H.P. Lovecraft, mere content should not lead to critical dismissal. If, for instance, crime and detective fiction have recently been turned to as new sites for understanding global literature, what can horror now open to comparative literary studies and theory?</p>
<p>Given the broad and new nature of this topic, our seminar seeks a range of papers, from large-scale interventions that situate horror broadly, to new close readings of works of horror, to re-readings of canonical texts as horror. How should horror be understood? Or, is it something that simply cannot be understood, but is, as Thacker suggests, a way of exploring the unthinkable, and so of bringing alternative philosophies, like the negative and nihilism, into the centers of critical discourse? Is there a hermeneutics of horror, in the sense of both a specific set of approaches keyed to horror and in the sense of a larger reading practice thought from within horror itself? Can traditional literary categories and even periods be rethought as horror? For instance, can European modernism, an idiom and aesthetic usually left out of genealogies of horror fiction, itself be read as a kind of literature of horror? Is horror compatible with realism? Is it a space where religion and theology have persisted in a secular age? How can horror help rethink recent areas of critical inquiry, including the global, cosmopolitanism, object-oriented ontologies, and the Anthropocene? </p>
<p>Please contact both Jack Dudley (<a href="mailto:dudley@msmary.edu">dudley@msmary.edu</a>) and Chris McVey (<a href="mailto:cmcvey@bu.edu">cmcvey@bu.edu</a>) with any questions.</p>
<p>Paper submissions for seminars will open Sept. 1 and close Sept. 23.</p>
<p>Further information about the conference is available at <a href="http://www.acla.org/annual-meeting" title="http://www.acla.org/annual-meeting">http://www.acla.org/annual-meeting</a></p>
Mon, 13 Jul 2015 17:11:26 -040062960 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu"With Nicholas Watson: Middle Time: Past, Present, and Future" at Kalamazoo 2016http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/62958
<p>____________________________________________________________<br />
As Carolyn Dinshaw would remind us, time is a product of multiple styles of representation. Time can be recursive (the seasons), or it can map one temporality onto another (the liturgy). It can even be imagined as moving towards its own ending (the apocalypse), either by the slow ticking of days or the rush of a visionary leap, one that moves from the time of the present to the end times.</p>
<p>This panel suggests that the idea of “middle time,” a notion that encompasses both scholarly constructions of the medieval past as “in the middle,” and medieval conceptions of that aspect or quantity of time lying between past and future, might prove useful as a tool for scholarly communication with the medium aevum. If the Middle Ages are understood by modern historiogrpahers as “intermediate,” do they interrupt, suspend, or join the time periods that come before and after them? Could those late medieval writers who inhabit spaces of the secular and the eternal, the historical and the prophetic (for instance, Julian of Norwich, John Mandeville, Margery Kempe, or William Langland) be said to write in a “middle” mode? How might contemporary scholars work with models of temporality from the past —and of the past—to better understand, as Nicholas Watson has put it, the “rich exchanges between present and past that are an often-repressed feature of our work?”</p>
<p>This session invites new research relating to the medieval and post-medieval constructions—both scholarly and imaginative—of the past, present and future.</p>
<p>Nota bene: This is a blind review panel. Nicholas Watson has agreed to present a paper, but a committee will select the other papers by a process of double blind review of the submitted abstracts. Abstracts from graduate students and junior scholars, particularly those in contingent faculty roles, are especially encouraged.</p>
<p>All questions, abstract submissions, and required information should be sent to Helen Cushman at <a href="mailto:helencushman@fas.harvard.edu">helencushman@fas.harvard.edu</a> by the congress deadline (September 15th).</p>
Mon, 13 Jul 2015 15:44:49 -040062958 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu"With Emily Thornbury: Dark Age Classicisms" at Kalamazoo 2016http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/62957
<p>_______________________________________________________________<br />
When Petrarch first likened the close of the Middle Ages to “the end of darkness and the night of error”—as contrasted, of course, with the “dawn of the true light” of Humanism—he could hardly have imagined the influence his characterization would soon acquire. Designations of the medium aevum as a “dark age” resound through nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historiography, and with these designations flourish a series of assumptions about the early Middle Ages in particular—that they were divorced from Classical learning and culture, and that they were a regressive and ignorant time. Thanks to important work by, among others, Martin Irvine, Alastair Minnis, and Michael Lapidge, we now recognize great continuities between Classical and Anglo-Saxon letters and culture, but much work remains to be done on the manner in which early English writers encountered, and appropriated, their classical pasts.</p>
<p>This panel explores one aspect of the classical in early England by focusing on what we term “dark age classicisms”— a phrase that connotes the early English reception or adaptation of the classical, on the one hand, and the idea of the “classic” in Anglo-Saxon England, on the other. To what extent, we ask, does pre-Conquest poetry refract or reject classical notions of aesthetic order and disorder, essence and ornament? Were certain works within the Old English canon considered to be “classics” in their time? Can works of poetry that describe times held at a remove from their present—such as Beowulf, or the Wanderer—be said to “classicize” their subject matter? And what influence do material survivals from the Greco-Roman past—in the form of books, objets d’art, ruins, and so forth—exercise upon the imaginations of the people who “recovered” them from loss, or obscurity, or darkness? </p>
<p>We welcome papers that engage with any aspect of the intersection between classical past and English present from the Roman withdrawal to the arrival of the Normans in the eleventh century.</p>
<p>Nota bene: This is a blind review panel. Emily Thornbury has agreed to present a paper, but a committee will select the other papers by a process of double blind review of the submitted abstracts. Abstracts from graduate students and junior scholars, particularly those in contingent faculty roles, are especially encouraged.</p>
<p>All questions, abstract submissions, and required information should be sent to Helen Cushman at <a href="mailto:helencushman@fas.harvard.edu">helencushman@fas.harvard.edu</a> by the congress deadline (September 15th).</p>
Mon, 13 Jul 2015 15:44:10 -040062957 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu[UPDATE] Beauty and Belief (deadline for abstracts: July 31; conference: November 5-6, 2015)http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/62953
<p>The conference will include a wide variety of sessions and topics on possible connections among (and tension between) literature, aesthetics, theory, and belief, broadly defined. Sessions will include—but not limited to—</p>
<p>•Creative writers discussing connections among (or possible conflicts between) aesthetics and faith in either their own work or the work of others.</p>
<p>•The analysis of literary texts or cultural artifacts that in some way explore or embody one or more aspects of religious belief or practice, broadly defined.</p>
<p>•A consideration of the impact of literary theory on religious belief and practice (and vice versa). Postsecular studies will be one topic for discussion, but presentations that cover other aspects of the relationship between theory and religion or theory and belief are equally welcome.</p>
<p>•Any other presentations that explore the complicated and sometimes fraught relationship between beauty and belief as embodied in music, literature, art, or culture.</p>
<p>Presentations should run approximately 15 minutes.</p>
<p>Deadlines</p>
<p>The deadline for abstracts and/or for proposals for category-specific sessions is July 31. Abstracts should be no more than 250 words. Abstracts and/or proposals for category-specific sessions should be sent to <a href="mailto:daniel_muhlestein@byu.edu">daniel_muhlestein@byu.edu</a> or <a href="mailto:jesse_crisler@byu.edu">jesse_crisler@byu.edu</a></p>
<p>Publication</p>
<p>The featured speakers and selected presentations from the conference will be published in a 2016 conference-specific issue of Literature and Belief.</p>
<p>Website for Literature and Belief: </p>
<p> <a href="http://literatureandbelief.byu.edu/" title="http://literatureandbelief.byu.edu/">http://literatureandbelief.byu.edu/</a></p>
Mon, 13 Jul 2015 11:56:41 -040062953 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduReconsidering Sodomyhttp://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/62952
<p>Following Foucault’s description of sodomy as “that utterly confused category,” literary scholars like Jonathan Goldberg and Alan Bray, among others, have continued to theorize the ways in which sodomy denotes no fixed set of bodily acts, but rather persists as a mobilizable category with social, political, and juridical valences. Sodomy necessarily persists, that is, in excess of the material bodily configurations it purports to police. Even so, much prevailing scholarship nonetheless returns to anal penetration as a presumptive and primary figuration in the discourse of sodomitical, disorderly, and/or illicit sexual acts. This panel pursues the question of sodomy and sexual practice in a diversity of cultural, geographical, and chronological locations in order to reconsider the theoretical stakes of sodomy’s resilient association with the anus. How are penetrative figures of sexual contact mobilized in discourses of (dis)order, transgression, ingress, and bodily coherence? How does the boundary between licit and illicit sexual acts materialize on and as the surfaces and orifices of the body? If we consider figurations of sexual contact beyond the limiting paradigm of penetration, what bodily configurations or practices emerge as potential sites of resistance to the norms of proper sexual contact? How, indeed, might retheorizing anti-normative sexual practice produce new images of the body itself? </p>
<p>Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: sodomy and the law in colonial and post-colonial contexts; the figural associations of sodomy with backwardness, behindness, and waste; the materiality of the orifice; the figural and/or literal disciplining of illicit or sodomitical sex; reconfigurations of bodily boundaries.</p>
<p>Please submit 300-word abstracts by September 30, 2015 through the NeMLA website at <a href="http://www.cfplist.com//nemla/Home/S/15941" title="http://www.cfplist.com//nemla/Home/S/15941">http://www.cfplist.com//nemla/Home/S/15941</a>.</p>
Mon, 13 Jul 2015 11:38:42 -040062952 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.eduFootprints of Orpheus: Cult, Topoi, and Character in Medieval and Early Modern Britain--abstract deadline September 30, 2015http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/62948
<p>Footprints of Orpheus: Cult, Topoi, and Character in Medieval and Early Modern Britain<br />
As scholars of Medieval and Early Modern culture, what can we learn from considerations of the Orphic presence in the literature of Britain? The idea and image of Orpheus, in folk narrative, cultural analogue, literary motif, emblem, symbol, and foundational myth, has influenced and inspired the British literary tradition since its very beginning, and as such offers opportunities for close readings of influence and innovation of the prototype. Drawn from Celtic, Classical, Scandinavian, and Continental source material, Orpheus and Orphic analogues have enabled the development and characterization of poetic progenitors, bardic personae, narrative performativity, and tales of the poet as hero, within and without patterns of social cohesion and divergence. Additionally, manifestations of Orpheus have informed notions of the authoritative “voice” of poetic text, links between creation and ownership of literary artifacts, the idea of the “author” as “tradition,” and the interface of performativity and the literary marketplace. Hosted by Professor David Pecan of SUNY Nassau, this NeMLA 2016 panel invites papers from interested faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars. Please submit proposals via the NeMLA website: <a href="https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/cfp" title="https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/cfp">https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/cfp</a> and access Session # 15726 or search term Orpheus. The deadline for abstract submission is September 30th, 2016.</p>
Mon, 13 Jul 2015 09:48:31 -040062948 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu Feminist Spaces 2.1 “Queering Feminism: LBGTQ and Feminist Intersectionality” due Oct. 1http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/62947
<p>Feminist Spaces invites undergraduate and graduate students to submit academic papers, creative writings, and artistic pieces that adhere to this issue’s theme of feminist LGBTQ+ intersectionality. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling regarding same-sex marriage equality and the media's growing interest in transgender men and women has re-initiated discussions of feminist intersectionality with regard to the LGBTQ+ movement. The feminist movement has been divided into various waves, each advancing a different majority opinion of LGBTQ inclusion or exclusion. Current feminist ideology, while predominately inclusive, necessitates a more uncompromising yet dynamic discussion of ways in which the LGBTQ+ movement and queer studies have affected feminist ethos, activism, and advancement. We especially welcome papers that discuss the experiences of racial minorities within the topic. We also welcome papers that discuss F-to-M inclusivity in feminism. </p>
<p>Please submit work no later than October 1, 2015. Please contact us at the email provided for any questions. </p>
<p>Submissions might address, but need not be limited to, the following:<br />
• Emergent feminist and/or queer theory<br />
• Feminist critiques or applications of queer theory<br />
• The political arena of sexual orientation<br />
• Gender fluidity / gender-fluid feminism<br />
• Intersexuality and feminist identity<br />
• Lesbian separatism within the feminist movement<br />
• Queer femininities and masculinities<br />
• Marriage equality as a civil rights victory/a reinstatement of<br />
patriarchal heteronormativity<br />
• Media coverage of minority women in feminist and LGBT activism<br />
• The socio-political and economic implications of trans<br />
inclusive/exclusive feminism<br />
• Transsexuality &amp; the gender binary<br />
• Problematics of the rhetoric of essence and gender embodiment<br />
• Gender roles within lesbian/gay households</p>
Mon, 13 Jul 2015 08:19:55 -040062947 at http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu